A Cross to Bear: A Jack Sheridan Mystery

by Vogel, Vince

  “Yeah. She told us some things, but it’s just…” Her lip quivered and she went misty-eyed. “I’m lost, Jack. I don’t know where to turn to.”

  Jack took a seat next to her on the bench and placed his arm gently around her.

  “What about Steve?” he said softly. “Can’t you talk to him?”

  “Huh!” she exclaimed with a tinge of bitterness. “I can’t talk to him about any of it. He’s so far away from me… I don’t know.”

  “You want to come into the office? Talk somewhere a bit more private?”

  He glanced up at the desk and saw that Sergeant Moore was busy leaning on the counter, trying her best to look as though she were going through some paperwork but actually listening in.

  “Yeah,” Helen muttered.

  Jack led Helen through the electric lights, gray carpet tiles, and white-painted brickwork of the old station, a relic of the Victorian era. Coming to the misted glass of the detectives’ office, he opened the door and ushered Helen inside. The only occupant was Detective Constable Debbie Brown, one of the other day team, sitting at her messy desk. Brown was in her late forties, with platinum-blonde cropped hair and a pretty face that did well to hide her age. She was always adorned in a trouser suit, today’s being a gray one with a white blouse open at the neck.

  When Helen and Jack entered, Brown was busy glaring at her computer screen with a frustrated look on her face.

  “Hey, sarge.” She nodded in Jack’s direction, before her eyes resumed their former glare at the screen.

  Jack sat down at his desk at the back of the room, and Helen sat herself down opposite.

  “Where are my manners?” Jack said, striking his forehead and getting up. “Would you like a tea or coffee?”

  “I’d love a tea,” she replied in a meek voice, a nervousness about her.

  “Milk, two sugars?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Hey, Debs?” Jack shouted across to his colleague, making Helen jump slightly.

  The detective constable looked up from the screen.

  “Sarge?”

  “You wanna cuppa?”

  “Love one,” Debbie Brown replied while her maddened eyes narrowed at whatever discomfort she was witnessing on the screen. With an angry shake of the head, she began bashing the Delete button on the keyboard with her finger.

  Jack went to the small worktop in the far corner of the office and made three cups of tea. The whole time, he kept an eye on Helen and observed her fidgeting. Under the desk, she wrung her hands, twisting her fingers within each other, and her knee jittered up and down. As for her face, it had taken on the same wretchedly sad look it had worn when he’d seen her sitting in reception before. Jack dismissed her behavior as nothing more than the result of tragically losing her daughter recently.

  Having dropped a tea off at Debbie’s desk, Jack came and sat back down with Helen. She thanked him for the tea and allowed a smile to momentarily flitter across her lips.

  “How’s the press treating you?” Jack enquired.

  “They were camped outside the house until six last night. Then this morning they were back. Every time either of us leave the house, they want a word. We’ve been bombarded with calls for interviews. Cards put through the door. They even managed to get Steve’s email address.”

  “They’re crafty bastards. What’s your liaison officer doing?”

  “She gets them to back away from the door. But there’s not much else she can do.”

  “They’ll leave you alone eventually.” There followed a pause of several seconds between them. Worried it could last forever, Jack added, “So what do you want to know about the case?”

  “I don’t know. Do you suspect anyone?”

  “Being an ongoing investigation, I can’t go into the ins and outs, but the truth is I haven’t got any solid suspects at the moment. That’s not to say that we’re not making inroads into this. I have many leads of enquiry.”

  “Such as?” she asked sharply.

  “Such as I’ve been to Rampton.”

  “Ugh!” Helen let out. “What did you think of it?”

  “Not a nice place to have to spend nine months.”

  “I used to hate going there.” She paused and her eyes shimmered in the electric light of the room. “It’s terrible I should say that,” she added. “To say that I hated going somewhere where I was visiting my own daughter.”

  “It’s understandable, Helen,” Jack soothed, thinking about his own visits to Marsha.

  “Not for a mother,” she retorted gently. “I was supposed to be there for her, and what good did I ever do?”

  “Helen, if you’re thinking of blaming any of this on yourself, I have to stop you. No one could have seen a thing like this coming. You’re not to blame.”

  “Am I not, Jack?” she asked with a widening of the eyes.

  Jack was about to ask her something when Debbie Brown suddenly cried out, “Shit!,” making them both look over at the aggrieved DC. Her lips were tightly screwed together, and her heavily mascaraed eyes shot lasers at the screen. Helen gradually turned back to Jack, smiled, and took a sip of tea.

  “When Becky was at Rampton,” Jack started saying once their eyes were away from the cursing DC, “did she ever mention a girl named Gemma?”

  “Of course,” Helen said softly. “They were very close.”

  “Did you ever meet Gemma?”

  “Yes. Her and Becky were inseparable. I was thinking of trying to find her and let her know about… about everything. But the two lost touch, and Becky never had any number or address for her.”

  “Why do you think they lost contact?”

  “I’m not totally sure. But I think when Becky left Rampton, Gemma refused to speak to her. Becky tried to visit and sent letters, but Gemma just blanked her, sent the letters back unopened. It really upset Becky for a while, but she just threw herself into her schoolwork and got on with it. That was when I knew she was so much stronger than she had been before.”

  “What about a Dr. Holby?”

  “I don’t know. I only knew a few of their names at Rampton.”

  “And Becky wasn’t seeing anyone outside of Rampton?”

  “We talked about it when she got out, but she was adamant that she was okay now and didn’t need one.”

  “What about the Beast?” Jack suddenly put to the mother, looking closely for a reaction.

  “The what?” Helen muttered, her face immediately suffusing with a look of terrified bewilderment, her eyes glimmering at Jack.

  “The Beast. Did Becky ever mention it?”

  “I… eh… where did you hear that?”

  “Something they said at Rampton,” he lied.

  “I… well, I heard her say it once… but…” Jack gazed intently at Helen as she struggled. He’d mentioned the Beast with little expectation, but here she was lost for words. As she opened her mouth to add something, her phone rang loudly in her handbag and she stopped herself.

  “I better get this,” she said, picking the handbag up from the floor and laying it on the desk. She took her phone out and answered.

  “Hey, Steve,” she said, “I’m just at the supermarket.” She threw a guilty glance across at Jack, and he wondered why she was lying. “Sure, sure,” she replied to whatever it was that her husband was saying to her on the other end. “I’ll be home in half an hour.”

  She put the phone down and smiled across at Jack.

  “I better be going,” she said, getting up in the process.

  Jack reached out and placed his hand on her arm, making her turn to him sharply as she rose from her seat.

  “If you ever feel that you need to tell me anything, Helen,” he said gently, “anything at all—you only have to call.”

  He took one of his cards from the desk and handed it to her. She rained a trembling smile down at him.

  “I will, Jack. Thank you.”

  She hastily left the office and was met at the door by Lange, who was entering from
outside. He held the door open for her and then followed her out along the corridor with his eyes, a slight frown knitting his brows.

  39

  When Helen Cuthbert was some way down the corridor and out of earshot, Lange turned to Jack at the far end of the room and asked if that was Becky Dorring’s mum.

  “Yes, it was,” Jack answered. “Now get over here, George.”

  “What was she doing here?” Lange asked as he shut the door, came across the room, and seated himself in Helen’s former place.

  “She wanted to know how we were getting on, and I was a little ashamed to give her nothing. Now what have you got me on Gemma Doe and Dr. Holby?”

  “Is this for me?” Lange asked, nodding toward the tea that Helen had hardly touched.

  “Of course, George.” Jack smiled.

  “Thanks, sarge,” he replied, picking the mug up and taking a sip. He then took out his notebook, looked at it, and said, “I’ll give you what I have on Dr. Holby first. I found one Dr. Holby in the whole area. Benjamin Holby. He’s a private shrink operating out of offices in Stratford on the high street. I’ve got the exact address here.”

  “Could be our man. I asked Helen and she’d never heard of him.”

  “Becky could have been seeing a shrink without telling her parents.”

  “Exactly what I was thinking, George. We’ll pay a visit to this Dr. Holby tomorrow. Okay, what about Gemma Doe?”

  “Where do I start? I’ll need the computer, so you better scooch over.”

  Jack shuffled along and Lange moved his chair around the table so that the two were sitting adjacent to each other in front of the screen.

  “Gemma Doe,” Lange began, “picked up when Walthamstow nick got a call about a woman going crazy at a private address. Someone saying they heard their neighbor shouting out for help. Uniform arrived to the sounds of a female screaming inside the flat. They broke in through the front door and discovered a fifty-year-old man cowering in the corner of the lounge covered in blood. They then came across a naked woman also covered in blood holding a piece of smashed mirror. All the furniture of the place was smashed to pieces, and it appeared that this was caused by the girl, who then charged the officers, and it took two of them to subdue her. Even after they’d maced her several times.”

  “Strong girl,” Jack remarked.

  “Clinical was the word they used.”

  “What about her print card?”

  “None.”

  “None? How’s that?”

  “Apparently she was so physical when they got her back to Walthamstow station that they immediately called an ambulance. She was spitting, trying to bite, she even fractured her wrist trying to get out of the cuffs. Full psycho was what the arresting officer put in the report.”

  “You bastard!” Debbie Brown shouted out from her desk.

  Lange and Jack eyed their colleague over the monitor for a second and then returned to looking at Gemma Doe’s arrest sheet.

  “The ambulance arrived,” Lange went on. “They pumped her full of sedatives and took her out of there in a straitjacket. The officers were pleased to see the back of her and didn’t bother trying any further with getting her prints or DNA. Then following that, she wasn’t charged with anything because the bloke whose knackers she ripped off refused to speak. And as far as resisting arrest and assaulting a police officer went, the officers at Walthamstow dropped it. After all, she was mentally ill at the time.”

  “So there was no need to go back for the prints,” Jack interjected.

  “Bingo.”

  “Is there anything they did get during her time at the nick?”

  “Yes. They managed to get a couple of photos when they first got her in there. They were worried she’d put in a complaint about the bruising on her body and the fractured wrist, so they wanted to cover themselves by documenting it. Even then they needed two officers to restrain her while they took the pics.”

  “Well, then we better take a look at these pictures, George.”

  Lange clicked on the attached files of the arrest sheet. They were presented with the snarling face of a young girl, two male officers on either shoulder holding her as she grimaced into the camera. She had blonde hair and dazzling blue eyes on a gaunt and bruised face, her purple bottom lip cut and swollen. She showed damage from a struggle—whether that was with the police, the castrated guy they found with her in the flat, herself, or all of them, neither detective could tell. As well as her swollen mouth, she had a black eye that had closed over, and her naked, skinny body showed terrible marks. Some scars of old, other cuts and bruises of new. Another photograph of her back showed the knobbly vertebra oozing up through the almost transparent film of pale skin, more bruises and pink scars covering its surface. And something else too.

  “What’s that?” Jack enquired out loud.

  Lange squinted his eyes and said it looked like a tattoo. He clicked on the area around her left shoulder blade and zoomed in. He was right. It was a tattoo of a woman’s head roughly three-by-three inches, a skull and crossbones above it and a banner below. The depicted woman was pretty but with a strong don’t-mess-with-me expression, much like the owner. On her top lip she wore a beauty spot and two piercing oval eyes gazed angrily out. She was wearing a bandana with a pearl in its center, flowing black curls cascading from it, and hooped earrings on each ear. Both men were impressed with the detail of the artwork.

  “A pirate?” Lange suggested.

  “Could be. Zoom in on the banner along the bottom. There’s something written on it.”

  Lange did as required.

  “Dead Tales Men No Tell?” Lange exclaimed in confusion.

  “Not quite. You have to read it along the banner. It says ‘Dead Men Tell No Tales.’ It’s not a pirate tattoo; it’s Irish gypsy. A gypsy tattoo.”

  “Could she be Irish gypsy?”

  “Would explain why she’s not on any records. They tend to exist on the edges of society as best they can and often don’t register births and deaths.” Jack began rubbing the stubble on his chin and eyeing the tattoo, a thoughtful expression on his face. “There was something a few years ago,” he said slowly.

  “What?”

  “Something that happened out in Hertfordshire.”

  Jack opened up an internet window and typed something into Google. He pressed Enter and the screen filled with lists of news stories.

  “That’s it,” Jack said, clicking on one from the Standard.

  It was an article about a fire at a gypsy camp four years ago. The camp sat in woods on the outskirts of Buntingford Village, Hertfordshire, about an hour’s drive north of London. The subheadings read: Fire engulfs camp killing two people. Destroys countless homes. Residents refusing to speak to the police. Fire department suspect arson. Local hoodlums suspected.

  “You’re not saying she’s from there, are you, sarge?” Lange said.

  “I’m not saying anything for certain. Just a theory.”

  “A theory?”

  “Hear me out. In Becky’s diary, she mentions that Gemma told her one night that men came and killed her parents. So the way my theory pans out is, Gemma Doe is born in secret for some reason on an Irish gypsy camp and isn’t registered at any point. She goes through life living at the camp and doesn’t find her way onto any records of any kind. Then something happens at that camp. Her parents are killed by people or a person, before a fire engulfs the place, covering it up. So she comes to London to survive after she’s made homeless. Then in London she does the only thing she can to get by on the streets. She sells her only possession: her body. Being a young girl, one previously growing up among the green and the heather, this messes her up and she’s committed after losing it on a client.”

  “This is bollocks!” Debbie Brown exclaimed.

  The two detectives once again peeked over the monitor at the frustrated detective, who looked like she was about to smash her computer. They both watched for a few seconds, before returning their attention to
their own computer screen.

  “Wait a minute, sarge,” Lange said. “You really think it could have actually happened that way?”

  “It’s a long shot, I know. But it’s the first link to anything other than Becky Dorring we’ve had on this girl.”

  “Okay, then, next question. And this is one that’s been bugging me all day.”

  “And what’s that, George?”

  “Why are you going so hard after some girl Becky shared a room with in Rampton?”

  “Because she knows the identity of the Beast. I’m sure of it. Get to her and we could find another great big piece to this puzzle.”

  “She could be dead too. Girls like her turn up dead all the time. Gemma Doe could as easily be Jane Doe now.”

  “I hope not, George. For our sakes. Because if we go to Benjamin Holby tomorrow and he says he’s never heard of Becky Dorring, I don’t have much else.”

  “We could ask Scotland Yard’s boys what they’ve got.”

  “We’re not that desperate yet, George. We’ll go to them only if we have absolutely nothing. I don’t want to give them the satisfaction of knowing we’ve hit a brick wall.”

  “Well, what now, then?”

  Jack searched the computer for the identities of the victims of the Buntingford fire. But he was left disappointed when he found that neither of the two charred remains found there were ever identified, and the other residents weren’t willing to cooperate with police and say who they were. The bodies were never even reclaimed for burial, which Jack knew was a big thing for Irish gypsies, and he wondered why no one had wanted to risk identifying the bodies by doing so.

  “Bugger it,” Jack grumbled. “That does that, then. We’ll try this Holby tomorrow. See if that pulls anything out of the fire.”

  “You going home, sarge?”

  “Yeah. It’s six now and evening shift will be out of briefing soon. I want to miss Wattsy.”

  “Is it because you had him up all night going over useless surveillance tape?”

  “It is.”

  “Asshole!” Debbie Brown shouted out.

  Jack shook his head and turned to the wrathful DC.